Content management systems: three takeaways from OTT Question Time #41

A Content Management System (CMS) – by definition – helps users create, manage, and modify content. When it comes to streaming services, where content interfaces with both back and front ends of a solution, the scope of its role grows exponentially, making it more complex to identify the several layers of an OTT CMS.

What is the scope of an OTT CMS, then? Is it just about drag-and-dropping items on a dashboard or does it include workflows that ingest and transcode video files for distribution? And how does it work when it comes to metadata?

VOD Professional’s Kauser Kanji hosted last week episode number #41 of OTT Question Time. Our Chief Commercial Officer, Dan Finch, sat down with Richard Amos, Chief Product Officer at Ostmodern, Bleuenn Le Goffic, VP Strategy & Business Development at Accedo, and Stefanie Schuster, Chief Commercial Officer at Axinom. Here is what we learned, in three key takeaways. ‍

#1. Digital world and OTT space: what’s next?‍

Live or on-demand, video content sits at the heart of any OTT service. Video CMSs come into play to simplify the editors’ life when looking at every single stage of the workflows that bring content from glass to glass. An OTT service’s CMS naturally focuses on video assets, their distribution and monetisation opportunities, but – our Dan Finch stated – “today, it also has to take into account every single layer of complexity brought by the various features of an OTT platform. In fact we should probably separate the concept of a Media Asset Management System (MAM), which focuses on media files per se, and the centralised CMS as we know it, which helps to bring all the different applications to life”. OTT services, indeed, are characterised by multiple outputs, which need to be seamlessly managed, and that’s the reason why CMSs have been evolving in due course, expanding the capabilities of what media asset management systems were providing before.‍

#2. Simplicity is the keyword‍

Broadcasters today are less focused on pure content management and more on the need to power multiple applications for their platform, or to enhance the monetisation of their own assets. The conversation between tech vendors and rights owners is mostly centred around architectures that can simplify workflows and bring together different modules from the same solution, or even multiple third parties. Increased complexity makes it difficult to control performances, especially with growing audiences. ‍

#3. Scheduling and enhanced monetisation‍

Among the main features an OTT CMS needs to bring to operators today is scheduling of content across dedicated publishing windows. Especially for VOD-to-live solutions, the ability to control the schedule well in advance becomes really important to evolve the CMS. Besides this are other elements such as social media extensions, and implementations of new. Finally, finding new avenues for monetisation links back to customer relationship management. “At Simplestream, as part of the backend solution we call Media Manager, we have an integration that links the CMS directly to the user database on Salesforce, – Dan Finch explained – but there are many other aspects to be considered, like for instance payment gateways to simplify the user experience on the front-end”.

The full recording of the webinar is available here.